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      Late Night Thinks It’s Unlikely That Neighbors Ate Your Cat

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      Before starting rumors about Haitians, please make sure your cat is actually missing, Ronnie Chieng implored on “The Daily Show.” Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘My Bad!’Erika Lee, a resident of Springfield, Ohio, who spread a rumor on Facebook that a Haitian neighbor had eaten a missing cat, deleted her post and expressed regret (but not before Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made “cat-eating Haitians in Ohio” a campaign issue).“Oopsie doopsie! Sorry, I set off a race war in the middle of a presidential election,” Ronny Chieng mimicked on Thursday’s “Daily Show.” “That’s totally my bad!”Another Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, who told the police that Haitians might have taken her cat Miss Sassy, later apologized to her Haitian neighbors after the animal turned up safe and sound.“Turned out, Miss Sassy — which is also my nickname for JD Vance — was in her basement.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Well if that isn’t the most Miss Sassy move I could possibly — [imitating Miss Sassy] ‘I’m gonna go hide in the basement to start some rumors. You know why? ‘Cause I’m sassy.’” — SETH MEYERS“By the way, if your cat goes missing, why would your first guess be someone ate it?” — SETH MEYERS“Here’s a little tip for anyone out there with a missing pet, OK? Before you accuse your Haitian neighbors of stealing them, maybe you could first try looking around your house.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rudy Rudy Rudy Edition)“At the rally, Trump did his usual rant about how New York has turned into a third-world hellhole. And to prove his point, he brought out a New York icon that has decayed beyond all recognition, Rudy Giuliani.” — RONNY CHIENG“Yeah, Rudy wasn’t actually invited — someone just said his name three times and he appeared.” — JIMMY FALLON“Rudy is so feral, I’m worried R.F.K. Jr. will put him in his trunk.” — RONNY CHIENG“He’s going to get you, and good luck trying to outrun Rudy Giuliani on three whiskeys.” — RONNY CHIENG, on Giuliani’s threat to anyone “behind” attacks on Trump: “I’m going to get you.”“That’s right, the guy who can’t differentiate a Four Seasons from a dildo store is gonna find you. You’ve been warned.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingSting performed his new song “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutDemi Moore in “The Substance.”MubiIn “The Substance,” Demi Moore stars as an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity. More

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      Anna Delvey’s Ankle Monitor Shines on Dancing With the Stars

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      The former fake heiress let her tracking device steal the show in her “Dancing With the Stars” debut. To survive another week, she may need to show some emotion.The ankle monitor finally had its moment to shine.In the opening seconds of Anna Delvey’s debut on “Dancing With the Stars” on Tuesday night, the cameras pulled in tight on the tracking device strapped to her ankle. Normally a staid black box, the monitor had clearly been through the show’s wardrobe department and was encrusted with a rainbow mix of crystals that perfectly matched Ms. Delvey’s fringed dress.Ms. Delvey, of course, is the former fake heiress whose legal name is Anna Sorokin. She served almost four years in prison after being convicted of stealing more than $200,000 from multiple businesses, and was then arrested by U.S. immigration authorities for overstaying her visa and put on house arrest (hence the ankle monitor).She is also the latest in a long line of contestants on the dance show who were seemingly picked for the controversy they were likely to inspire.The focus on Ms. Delvey’s ankle monitor helped her lackluster performance stand out on social media among more ambitious routines from contestants like the actress Chandler Kinney and the former N.B.A. star Dwight Howard (even if her dancing placed her in the bottom-third of the pack).But if Ms. Delvey was happy about having been allowed to travel to Los Angeles for the show, you wouldn’t know it from her cha-cha.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Very Royal Scandal’ Is a Juicy British Drama

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      This taut and serious Amazon series chronicles the time when Prince Andrew was interviewed on TV about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.Ruth Wilson, left, and Michael Sheen in a scene from “A Very Royal Scandal.”Christopher Raphael/Blueprint, via Sony“A Very Royal Scandal,” available now on Amazon Prime Video, tells — retells — the story of when the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew on television in 2019 about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. The very first thing he says in the interview is that “there is no good time to talk about Mr. Epstein and all things associated.” Welp …The mini-series is tightly focused — its three episodes cover the period just before the interview, the interview itself and the immediate aftermath, with a few key flashbacks — but the show exists in a hall of mirrors of real-world scandals and media. “Royal” lives in the shadow of the crown, and in the shadow of “The Crown,” and is part of a prestige-laundering industry that refashions tabloid ignominy and wretchedness into cool-toned, highbrow drama. And it follows the movie “Scoop,” starring Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell, which premiered in April and is about the same interview.Michael Sheen stars as Prince Andrew, depicted here as stuffy and frustrated, unappreciated by his brother and devoted to his mother, neither of whom we see. His daughters adore him, as does his ex-wife, but he insists that the happiest time in his life was fighting in the Falklands War. Royal staffers whisper that he is so insulated from the world that he’s incapable of understanding it.Ruth Wilson plays Maitlis (herself an executive producer of the mini-series), a harried mom devoted to Velcro rollers and late night Google sessions. Wilson drops her voice to more closely resemble Maitlis’s, but it’s so unconvincing that it makes the fictionalized Maitlis seem phony, as if she were stealing a move from the Elizabeth Holmes playbook.The show plays out as a slow-motion car crash, a what-not-to-do case study for media relations — or perhaps a what-to-do guide for interviewing the terminally hubristic. Anyone who watches the full interview could rightly wonder, “How could you be so stupid to sit for an interview like this and say things like that?” “Royal” does a thorough, energetic, juicy-but-serious job of answering.And yet, the show can’t escape its own admission that there are much bigger questions one could ask about rape, misogyny, money, secrecy and power. Maitlis has a pat monologue about the injustice of it all, but the call is coming from inside the mini-series. More

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      ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Go Fish

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      Miriel tests the waters. Sauron tests everyone’s sanity.Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Where Is He?’By the end of this week’s episode of “The Rings of Power,” Adar’s Orc army is fully besieging Eregion, beginning a battle that will play out in the next episode. But before the show shifts into military mode for a while, the show’s creators, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (along with this episode’s credited writer, Justin Doble, and director, Sanaa Hamri), reset the stage across Middle-earth and far away in Numenor, to make sure we know exactly where all the players are, as Season 2 enters its endgame.The result is an unusually busy hour for this series. Every major character makes an appearance, in scenes that run a bit shorter than usual. This is a welcome change of pace from last week’s sometimes interminable conversations, which kept circling topics long after they had been exhausted. Granted, some of this episode’s segments — like most anything involving the Durin family or Annatar — do hit familiar beats, dredging up those old arguments for another round. But there is some forward progress here, even if everyone is now racing headlong into various bloody melees.Here are five takeaways and observations from Episode 6:The Valar decidesIn a startling turnaround, the Numenor sequences in this episode are responsible for one of the most thrilling moments of the season — although, typical of the Numenorians, we have to get a few speeches out of the way first.The matter before the island’s leadership is whether Elendil will apologize for the crime of sedition, bend the knee to Pharazon and be spared a death sentence. When he refuses to comply fully, Miriel comes to her loyal subject’s aid, claiming an ancient legal right to face the judgment of the Valar in his place. This requires Miriel to wade into the surrounding seas and wait for an enormous underwater beast — “the sea worm” — to swim up to her, at which point this slimy thing will either swallow her up or deem her worthy.The buildup to the big plunge takes a while. But the payoff is sublime, in a terrifying sequence of the sea worm yanking Miriel into the deep, staring her down, surrounding her with giant tendrils and then letting her live. The assembled crowd — with the exception of the new king’s partisans — erupts into jubilant shouts, dubbing her “queen of the sea.” Pharazon tries to recover from this setback by scrambling into his chambers to consult the palantir.What does he see? A dark, fiery future. And a face familiar to us: Sauron’s.Going battyI don’t want to dwell too much on what goes down in Khazad-dum this week, because frankly the dwarf story line has fallen into a deep, deep rut. The underground sets remain amazing, and the performances by the actors — some of them sporting thick beards, no less — remain impressive. But the plot is going nowhere new. King Durin III is still being driven mad with greed by his ring and making decisions that endanger his people, while Prince Durin IV keeps arguing with Disa about how they should handle the situation. There are some strong emotional underpinnings to the father-son relationship; but those bonds have been well-established and don’t need as much screen time as they get.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Aaron Sorkin Thinks Life Still Imitates ‘The West Wing’

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      When it premiered on NBC on Sept. 22, 1999, “The West Wing” contained elements of both what great television had been and what great television would become.It had the strict structure, self-contained episodes and PG-13 language of esteemed network contemporaries like “NYPD Blue” and “ER.” (John Wells was an executive producer of both “ER” and “The West Wing.”)But the show’s sophisticated content, idiosyncratic sensibility and season-long story lines anticipated the prestige-television boom of cable and eventually streaming. It was a ratings hit and won the Emmy for outstanding drama series four times, one of only five programs to do so. (The others: “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law,” “Mad Men” and “Game of Thrones.”)Twenty-five years later, “The West Wing” is a cultural touchstone: dissected by podcasts, parodied for its trademark style, still viewed regularly on Max — more than 212 million viewing hours’ worth since 2020, according to Nielsen. Several cast members were feted at the Emmy Awards last Sunday, and on Friday, the first lady, Jill Biden, will honor the series at the real White House.“It is particularly gratifying that a whole new generation of people, thanks to streaming, are watching the show,” Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, said in an interview last week. Sorkin wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode of the first four seasons and then left the series, which continued for three more seasons without him and ended in 2006.Although it took place in an alternative universe, “The West Wing” initially resembled the late Clinton era in Washington (minus the sex scandal). Played by Martin Sheen, President Josiah Bartlet — economist, Nobel laureate and descendant of a delegate sent to the Continental Congress in 1776 — strove to balance progressive principles with the realities of governing, all while combating the small-government conservatism of the Republicans who controlled Congress.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jimmy Fallon: With Trump in Town, New York Is ‘a Lot More Florida’

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      The “Tonight Show” host quipped about the former president’s rally in Long Island on Wednesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Hard to Be HumbleFormer President Donald Trump held a campaign rally on Long Island on Wednesday.“Yeah, tonight the rest of the country found out New York is a lot more Florida than you think,” Jimmy Fallon said.“Organizers said that there were 60,000 online ticket requests. It turns out Rudy Giuliani just passed out with his head on the keyboard.” — JIMMY FALLON“But the rally at Nassau Coliseum was historic. The last time a president appeared at the Coliseum was when President Biden fought the lions in Rome.” — JIMMY FALLON“At a Trump campaign rally last night, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that her kids keep her humble and added, ‘Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything to keep her humble.’ Though I’m not sure the math checks out there, because doesn’t Trump have, like, five?” — SETH MEYERS“Everyone knows if you don’t have biological kids, you can’t be humble. It’s like that famous Ernest Hemingway story, ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes. Didn’t Need ’Em Cuz I’m a Playa!’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Poll Position Edition)“According to a new poll, Vice President Kamala Harris has a 6-point lead over former President Trump following last week’s debate. And if you think that’s a big lead, then you just don’t follow New York football.” — SETH MEYERS“That same poll found that 61 percent of likely voters believe Harris won the debate, which seems low to me, but it seemed very high to Trump, who posted last night, ‘Finally everyone is agreeing that I won the debate with Kamala. It was like a delayed reaction, but as one political pundit said, Trump is still the GOAT.’ He thinks his caddy at Mar-a-Lago counts as a political pundit.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“According to a new poll, young people are nervous about the 2024 election. Oh, my God, am I young?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel dug out footage of Jon Hamm rapping in his high school production of “Godspell” for the actor’s appearance on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightDemi Lovato will discuss her new documentary, “Child Star,” on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutAaron Hernandez has been the subject of multiple books, true crime podcasts and documentaries.Pool photo by Steven Senne“American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” delves into the saga of the pro football player who murdered his friend less than a year after playing in the Super Bowl. More

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      ‘Agatha All Along’ Review: Toil and Trouble

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      Marvel’s “WandaVision” spinoff has more witchcraft but less magic.This review contains spoilers for the first episode of “Agatha All Along.”Jac Schaeffer, who created the first of the Disney+ Marvel series, “WandaVision,” and has now created the 11th, its spinoff “Agatha All Along,” is not one to let an idea go to waste.In Schaeffer’s first series, a grieving superheroine used her magical powers to create a world for herself based on classic American sitcoms. It was entertaining to watch how the show reimagined those familiar comedies within a dark fantasy-science fiction framework. (At least until “WandaVision” went off the rails toward convoluted Marvel business as usual in its last few episodes.)Now she starts “Agatha All Along,” which premiered Wednesday night on Disney+, with another detailed sendup. This time she puts her new main character — Agatha Harkness, a dangerous witch with a half-century history in Marvel comic books — inside a parody of the grim HBO crime drama “Mare of Easttown.” Still stuck where she was at the end of “WandaVision,” under a spell that strips her powers and any memory of who she really is, the fallen sorceress is now a cynical, violence-prone small-town police officer.You may ask yourself how, in the three years that have elapsed between the two shows, Agatha has undergone a complete personality shift, from chirpy neighborhood noodge to hardened cop. You should be more concerned, though, with why the cop-show pastiche is so disappointing — so dull and aimless that talented comic actresses like Kathryn Hahn (who stars as Agatha) and Aubrey Plaza seem at a loss.It is a relief when that show-within-a-show ends during the first episode, apparently a quick diversion rather than an integral element like the sitcom burlesques in “WandaVision.” (Four of the nine episodes of “Agatha All Along” were available for review.)It has set a bad precedent, though. Even when the series shifts into its actual format — a jokey, jaggedly comic fantasy quest in which a group of unfulfilled women hit the road in search of their powers — the results are mostly perfunctory. Spells are cast, but not on the audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Valarie D’Elia, Travel Reporter on TV and Radio, Dies at 64

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      She steered vacationers and business travelers to choice destinations, talked about the best deals, and offered up savvy tips on how to avoid vexation.Valarie D’Elia, a travel reporter who visited 102 countries on all seven continents to advise her viewers and listeners on where to go, how to get there, what the best bargains were and what to pack, died on Sept. 10 in Manhattan. She was 64.The death, in a hospital, was caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative neurological disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, her husband, Ron Cucos, said.From 1998 to 2017, Ms. D’Elia appeared regularly in a segment called “Travel With Val” on the local cable TV station now known as Spectrum News NY1. She also hosted a syndicated radio program, “The Travel Show,” and wrote a blog, which included the trademark feature “D’Elia’s Deals.” (Her personal mantra was “Travel with VALue.”)Her viewers, listeners and readers might learn that ski resorts in the Canadian Rockies were opening in early November that year because of snow storms; that a hotel near London was offering complimentary honeymoon accommodations to couples who got married there; or that rare winter discounts were available at a resort in the Florida Keys timed to school vacations the first week of January in several Southern states.Her advice was coveted. (Her favorite was “Pack light, forget the blow-dryer — who wants to worry about all that stuff?”) Her wanderlust was celebrated. Her documentary “The Making of a Maestro: From Castelfranco to Carnegie Hall,” the story of the conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, won first place in the North American Travel Journalists Association’s competition for travel videos in 2018.From 1998 to 2017, Ms. D’Elia appeared regularly in a segment called “Travel With Val” on the cable channel now known as Spectrum News NY1.NY1We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More